Lifting the Veil is a must-see documentary by Scott Noble, with great visuals and intelligent interviews, featuring Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, John Pilger and a host of others.

Democrat, Republican, these parties are all part of the same corporate ruling system. As the film makes clear, the two-party U.S. political system is being played like a Stradivarius by the richest half percent of the country. Here’s a list of players to reference as you watch:

The Wolves: The Republican Party
The Foxes: The Democratic Party
The Chickens: you and me

Lifting the Veil from S DN on Vimeo.

Book aficionado RayneeDaze has posted a review of Terminal Departure: A Cleo Matts Novel on her Reading Frenzy blog:

Terminal Departure is a wild ride… Well written and full of action and adventure you won’t want to put it down because you have no idea what’s going to happen next.

Read the complete review: Review of Terminal Departure.

Terminal Departure is available at the following links:
Kindle edition
Nook edition

Follow me on Twitter: @jwcrubau

Dude-lit book reviewer Hank Brown at Two-Fisted Blogger was gracious enough to review Terminal Departure, and he’s given it a 5-star review on Amazon:

Crubaugh has written a page-turning gigglefest involving competing secret and pseudo-secret government agencies, germ warfare conspiracies and alien abduction. This is one of those indie books that overcomes the stigma of poor editing, amateurish prose, etc. It’s quirky and laugh-out-loud funny…

Read the rest of his review here: Terminal Departure by Joe Crubaugh.

Terminal Departure is available at the following links:
Kindle edition
Nook edition

Follow me on Twitter @jwcrubau

For Sample Sunday, I’m sharing a stand-alone chapter (chapter 17) from my new book, Terminal Departure: A Cleo Matts Novel.

You can read the entire chapter here on GoodReads: The Prince and Breast Milk Cheese.

To set up the scene, the chapter opens with the book’s antagonist, CIA agent Roman Demetrio, monitoring the interrogations of four plane crash survivors. While he and an Army general watch the process via closed-circuit monitors, they discuss the black man in the famous painting by Leutze: Washington Crossing the Delaware. If you can’t immediately spot him in the painting, read the chapter exerpt–it explains the whole story.

The characters also discuss something I’ve found strange in our culture since I first wondered about it years ago: Why are most adults ok with consuming milk from a filthy cow, but the idea of drinking milk from their own species turns their stomach?

Apparently, some others have wondered about this irrational reaction, too.

Earlier this spring, New York University graduate student Miriam Simun created an art display, The Lady Cheese Shop, in which she enlisted the help of three nursing women to provide connoisseurs with a variety of samples of human breast milk cheese.

Also earlier this year, Icecreamists, an ice-cream parlour in London’s Covent Garden, offered human breast milk ice-cream for sale. Store founder Matt O’Connor had this to say:

It’s pure, it’s natural, it’s organic, and it’s free range — and if it’s good enough for our kids, it’s good enough to use in our ice cream.

But, not everybody agrees. A few days later, local government officials confiscated the ice cream. Their reasoning? They were responding to two complaints from the public over whether a shop should be selling edibles made from other people’s bodily fluids. But they’re ok, as villain Roman Demetrio asserts, with consuming the bodily fluids of “a sh*t-splattered cow?”

To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “…and so it goes.”

As always, you can find the rest of my novel at the following links:

Amazon Kindle: Terminal Departure: A Cleo Matts Novel.

B&N Nook link: Terminal Departure: A Cleo Matts Novel.

Follow me on Twitter: @jwcrubau.

Search the Internet for “greatest novel ever” and you get a ton of lists compiled by the likes of Time and Modern Library and Wikipedia. What you don’t get is the truth.

For I know that the greatest novel of all time is not on these lists; the greatest novel of all time is rotting at the bottom of a drawer in my bedroom. This priceless manuscript has collected dust the past few years, unseen through many dark and stormy nights while Netflix spewed from the TV in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of College Gameday Football while Facebook rattled along the screen of my laptop. Nevertheless…

Like many great works, this novel was rejected by a slew of unreceptive literary agents. Why? Because it didn’t fit their mold of maximum profit—a mold designed to churn out vanilla fiction for consumers with IQs of 100 and appetites for munching bottom sand in the holes where they dug and placed their heads.

These vapid readers inhabiting the wide middle of the consumer bell curve prefer trudging slop like Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, or To Kill a Mockingbird.

Meh. Those novels are fine, but do they have…
Badass secret agents?
False flag ops?
C4 explosives?
Aliens?
Gorgeous A-list celebrities on the lam?
Genetically-modified super viruses?
Intra-CIA civil wars for the spoils of the world?
Presidents who can’t bowl worth a crap?

No? Well, then I guess you’d have to say Ulysses COULD have been a great novel, but Terminal Departure, by yours truly, KICKS. ITS. EVERLOVING. BUTT. ;-)

So, while I’m polishing the greatest novel of all time for Kindle and Nook format, I give you the first chapter at the link below. I’ll try to clean up and post a new chapter each Monday.

Read Terminal Departure

UPDATE: Terminal Departure: A Cleo Matts Novel is now available at the following links!
Kindle edition.
Nook edition.